Labour Offence Watch: Who Will They Alienate Next Week?

Last week the Labour Party managed to offend British business, teachers and nuns.

In the seven days since then, Miliband and his team have further succeeded in antagonising the British Chamber of Commerce, people who drink Irn-Bru, the family of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, and fifty percent of the entire population.

First Ed Miliband failed to turn up at a BCC event where both David Cameron and Nick Clegg were speaking, initially fobbing them off with the excuse that he had an important diary clash but then admitting he had spent the entire day in his office just down the road.

Then Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy was revealed to have charged the taxpayer £1.30 on expenses for two cans of Irn-Bru, Scotland’s other national drink. Hardly a good look when he brands himself as the country’s ‘Irn-Bru street fighting’ man of the people.

How on earth a Labour aide managed to come away from a conversation with Nick Robinson with him reporting that Miliband believed a minor row about a Tory donor was another “Milly Dowler” moment only he knows.

And then there was Labour’s pink van. Despite female Labour MPs campaigning for years about pink toys setting negative gender stereotypes for girls, their deputy leader and one of their longest campaigners on feminist issues decided it would be a good idea to convince women to vote for them by travelling round the country in a pink van.

For two weeks running Labour have spectacularly managed to alienate whole swathes of the population with a series of wholly unforced errors. With 82 says until the election Labour cannot afford for this to become a theme.